Paper. It creeps onto your desk silently, lurking, stealing space and creating clutter. But paper does more than just make your office messy – it steals money from you and wastes your employees time. Here are three ways paper costs your company money:

1. Filing costs – It costs the average business $20 to correctly identify and file away a document. That includes the time to identify, create a file folder, and put the file away in its correct location. Of course, finding a lost document or misfiled costs even more – depending on the size of your business it could be up to $120, mainly in labor hours. What is your time worth, and how long does it take you to find a missing file?
2. Space/Storage costs - Filing cabinets take up valuable space, including the space needed to actually safely open the drawers. A 3 foot wide filing cabinet may need almost 10 square feet of floor space to open. Depending on your real estate costs you could be spending hundreds of dollars a year simply storing away your paper. How often do you access your paper, and is it worth the annual costs to have all of it right next to you?
3. Sharing costs – Paper documents can only realistically be viewed and annotated by one or a couple of people at the same time. If you need to get the paper to someone in a different office, you need to mail, fax or scan and email it to them. Plus, you only have two choices: give the file away to someone else (losing control) or keep the file private by not letting it out of your possession. Copying and mailing a document is less than 50 cents – but that excludes the time and effort required to get the document there, and ignores the fact that you no longer control the data.

With online document management services, you no longer need to wake up one to the realization that you’ve lost the ability to find important pieces of information under a mound of dead trees. Go digital and reduce the time needed to file, save the space needed to store and gain the ability to securely share your files.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Document Management, Organization, Paperless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.